How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now

Another scenario that can lead to children losing interest is when curiosity is punished. A child’s appetite for discovery can be ruined by an overly rigid pedagogical strategy.

At birth, all the large fiber bundles of the brain are already in place. Brain plasticity can, however, reorganize their terminal connections. Millions of synapses undergo plastic changes every time we acquire new knowledge. Enriching children’s environments, for instance, by sending them to school, can deeply enhance their brains and augment them

Immediately after reading our textbook or our class notes, information is fully present in our mind. It sits in our conscious working memory, in an active form. We feel as if we know it, because it is present in our short-term storage space . . . but this short-term compartment has nothing to do with the long-term memory that we will need in order

Neuronal firing becomes more efficient and reproducible, pruned of any parasitic activity, unfolding unerringly and as precisely as clockwork. This is procedural memory: the compact, unconscious recording of patterns of routine activity.

Habituation refers to an organism’s capacity to adapt to the repeated presence of a stimulus

The good side of things is that, because our circuits freeze up, we get to keep, for our entire lives, a stable, unconscious synaptic trace of what we learned as children.

children. Research is clear on this point: learning works best when math teachers first go through an example, in some detail, before letting their students tackle similar problems on their own.

If, however, they see the same person pressing a button with her head for no particular reason, hands completely free and perfectly visible, then the babies seem to abandon all reasoning and blindly trust the adult—they faithfully imitate the action with a bow of the head, although this movement is meaningless.

Dopamine, for example, is the neurotransmitter associated with reward: food, sex, drugs

It slowly weakens over time, starting with the peripheral sensory areas, but high-level cortical areas keep their potential for adaptation throughout our lives. This is why many adults successfully learn to play an instrument or speak a second language in their fifties or sixties. And this is also why educational interventions sometimes work miracl